1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to transmitting environment information of a terminal to a controlling unit that controls as to whether or not to provide a service to the terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has become common to provide a service from a terminal of a service provider to a terminal of a user via a network. To ensure the security of the service, before providing the service, the environment of the user terminal is checked. The environment information includes information regarding the softwares installed in the terminal such as the operating system (OS), the basic input-output system (BIOS), the browser, the plug-in softwares, and the hardware included into or attached to the terminal, such as the CPU, the memory, and the PCI board.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2004-157790 discloses a technology to reject providing a service to the user terminal the user for which the security cannot be ensured. Whether the security can be ensured is decided based on environment information acquired from the user terminal. For example, when the environment information indicates that a software with security holes has been installed in the user terminal, it is decided that the can not be ensured.
Thus, the conventional technology makes use of the environment information of the user terminal to decide whether to provide service. However, some users are reluctant to disclose the environment information of their terminal to the service provider.
Moreover, the environment information of terminals keeps on changing every moment. Therefore, to improve the reliability, the service provider needs to check the environment information each time before providing the service. However, it is time consuming and inefficient to check the environment information each time before providing the service.